now that I've worn out the world
by shrinkingsoul
Summary: She was already past the gates of hell. She'd burned 'em down and smeared the ashes on her face and laughed at the devil himself and here she was, alive as alive could be.
1. one

_Now that I've worn out, I've worn out the world_  
_I'm on my knees in fascination_  
_Looking through the night_  
_And the moon's never seen me before_  
_But I'm reflecting light_  
**Sam Phillips**

* * *

She missed _air conditioning,_ of all things. Beth Greene could only guess how long it had been since she'd last seen a living human face and yet on this night, as her hot skin stuck to the bare twin mattress in the cabin she'd found, she begged the ceiling to let her fall asleep and dream of nothing but air conditioning. Tucked into a back room on the second floor, she had tried to open the windows to create a breeze, but only one of them would open without a screech loud enough to draw every walker this side of the Mississippi to her front yard. There were already several nearby; she could hear them shuffling through the dry grass.

When she was little, their house on the farm didn't even have central air. Her earliest memories melted together into a stream of neverending summer vacations: sweat blurring her vision and sunshine beating into the skin on her shoulders while she helped her daddy with the animals, and lying on the floor feeling completely helpless and stupid with the box fan in the window set as high as it would go because even at night, summers in Georgia are hotter than hell itself. It wasn't until Beth was in middle school that the family decided to make the investment. Which meant that she could probably dig deep and find within her a well of tolerance for the ungodly amount of perspiration pouring from her body, but honestly… she couldn't be fucked, as Maggie would put it. She was tired. Her whole being felt heavy.

And  
_damn  
_it.

It was _hot._

The ghost of a song that her brother used to play unfolded in the back of her mind..._ stand me up at the gates of hell but I won't back down_…and she couldn't help but smile. She was already past the gates of hell. She'd burned 'em down and smeared the ashes on her face and laughed at the devil himself and here she was, alive as alive could be. Weary. And lonely. And melting into a puddle.

But alive.

She spent what seemed like hours tripping across the threshold of sleep and awake, sleep and awake, sleep and awake. She wasn't sure when it happened but her brain had slowly adapted to being alone. Even when she was sure she was dreaming, she could still hear every tiny whisper that the world around her made. The house groaning and settling into the humidity. The mosquitoes buzzing around her face. The walkers stumbling around the yard, moaning and hissing and bumping into the piles of junk left around by the cabin's owners. Very distant thunder rumbling, the sky as empty of rain as her stomach of real food. She had been hunting four times in the past two days but it seemed too hot for even the squirrels to stir, driving her to partake of the extensive collection of canned pickled cabbage and beets in the cellar of the cabin. It was better than nothing, but… didn't anybody like beef jerky anymore?

Beth rolled over onto her side. The rusty bed frame squawked like a bird and jolted her into consciousness at the same time that she heard footsteps on the front porch. Firm, sure, evenly placed footsteps approaching the door.

Her heart slammed into her throat.

For several days she had debated on whether or not she even wanted to stay in the little log cabin, worrying that it was too horror-movie-obvious for the girl running for her life to shack up in the creepy house in the woods. In the end she'd decided that the surrounding woods were thick enough to provide camouflage, so she'd found a heavy shovel and knocked out the rotting steps which led to the high front porch. It was exactly low enough for her to climb up with practiced ease, which meant that her visitor was definitely living.

Reaching for the knife in her boot and the gun on the table, she listened, waited. The front door scraped against the floor as it opened, followed by a muffled "shit" when it slammed into the noise trap she'd set. Her breath felt like sandpaper in her chest as she slipped off of the bed and crept into the hallway as slowly as possible to avoid making the floorboards creak. Whoever it was down there, she was determined to see them before they saw her.

The footsteps moved around the first floor, steady and quick, opening more doors with consecutive bangs. She heard them rummaging through the emptied jars she'd left out on the kitchen table and shuffling through the piles of newspaper and junk mail. Suddenly the person fell silent as if waiting for something to happen. Beth didn't breath. The beam of a flashlight swept toward the stairs and followed them up, stopping no more than three feet from where she stood. Her head felt light and she vaguely acknowledged that they seemed far too rushed to be doing a basic supply run, especially at this time of night. The human body could learn to tell time simply by the way things felt, and the night was still too thick to be any later than one or two in the morning.

Anger sparked in her belly, sharp as a knife, and it burned through her so hot and fast that she was nearly blinded by it. Three times now she had been forced from her home. Three times swallowed whole by the horror of this world, and she didn't deserve to have it happen again. She'd be damned. Her finger found the curve of the trigger and she willed her pulse to stop thrumming so loudly behind her ears. Sweat rolled down her back. _Come on, you bastard._

Raindrops tapped against the window. In just a few moments the whole house was immersed in the white noise of a heavy downpour, so loud that she could barely make out the steps of the stranger on the staircase. They were close, though; in the light of their torch she could see the outline of her reflection in the bathroom mirror across the hall. It was too late to move or hide and for just one moment Beth felt very small, standing in the dark with a dead man's pistol in her sweaty hands. She was alone in this fight, again, but she was going to win it. Again.

The stranger was in front of her now, sweeping their light down the hallway. If this were any other day she might have considered letting them spot her first, just so they'd know exactly who sent them to meet their maker, but they were likely wound tight from expecting a monster around every corner and she wasn't going to risk it. So she lifted her gun and she pulled the trigger.

And in between the static thunder of the rain, as the flashlight hit the floor with her target, she heard her name, plain as day.

Oh _God._

"Daryl?" This wasn't real. It could not be and it wasn't. It wasn't. Her mind had played increasingly nasty tricks on her recently but this… this was a brand new ballgame.

She hadn't cried in so, so long but her daddy's face flashed behind her eyes, and her mama's and Judith's and Maggie's, and her knees cracked when they made contact with the floor. Not too long ago her family had been the only reason she was still alive, the only reason why she kept pushing through all of the shit that kept happening, and the only thing that that hope ended up being good for was keeping her around long enough to watch them all be torn away from her. It was cruel. And she was tired.

She felt around for the flashlight, but the batteries had been knocked out and she couldn't find them. Her chest was turning inside out and she couldn't catch a breath but she had to know. She reached out to touch his face and

And she was alone, lying on the tiny bed in a dusty beam of sunlight with her eyelashes matted together.

Cicadas sang beyond the open window. The air was cooler and she welcomed it into her lungs, though it was still humid enough to drown. Turning her head, she saw that the pistol was exactly where she had left it on the table last night and she pressed her face into the pillow trying to erase the images and feelings from her dream. When she was little, her grandma had once told her that if she put her shoes under her bed at night, she wouldn't have anymore bad dreams. That woman had held onto her superstitions right up to her death, like refusing to let anyone bring wildflowers into the house or else risk bad luck, and thus had been the subject of many good-natured eyerolls from her family, but Beth had trusted her more than almost anyone else.

Maybe she could find several extra pairs of shoes and stuff them all under her bed. At least until she could put enough distance between herself and the past.

* * *

_Note: I haven't written fanfic in SUCH a long time! A while ago I accidentally started shipping Bethyl harder than I've ever shipped anything, so one thing led to another annnnd... I'm excited! Thanks for reading. xoxo_

_P.S. This is pre-season 5. _


	2. two

Sometimes the sunlight fell through the windows in a way that reminded her of her home, and it made her chest ache as it hadn't since before she could remember. During those moments she felt her whole life sticking to her like cobwebs under her skin, moving with the shape of every breath she took, and the friction was so maddening she thought she would explode.

She felt it this morning as she stood in the hallway near the cabin's front door, breathing deep of the scent of dust and lingering smoke. The sun had just begun to lean through the trees and the plastered walls were dripping with yellow light. She thought of first days of school and blueberry pancakes and waiting for the bus with her shoes wet from dew, butterflies in her stomach as she chattered to Maggie about her brand new teacher and the markers in her bag. Now her backpack was heavy with the jars of beets from the cellar. They certainly weren't pizza Lunchables or strawberry jelly sandwiches, but the wind had a chill and the light was tinted with autumn- Beth was getting better at hunting, but she wasn't yet good enough to get herself through the winter on her own. She could kill walkers all day if that's what she needed to do… people, when she _had_ to… but hunting was a skill best carved from long, languid strokes of time that she simply didn't have.

To be honest, she couldn't focus long enough to stop glancing over her shoulder. Even when she knew there wasn't a sound, she made one up. She was running in circles from herself.

Beth missed the sure, steady weight of her family. She grieved for them and felt the hollowness of the air around her, but there was a small, stubborn pocket of hope that they had all made it out of the prison too. That day seemed like it was a thousand years ago, a million Beths ago.

She stood for a moment absorbing the feeling of living in a place that was just her own. She used to daydream about it in high school every once in a while, usually involving a townhouse in a city or a pretty cottage on a hill- hardly a run-down piece of crap with a leaky roof in the middle of the woods-but it felt warm. She was safe. But she had to leave. Beth ran her hand along the wall in a silent goodbye and opened the door to damp, green air and birdsong. Even counting the veritable junk yard spread across the lawn it was an incredibly beautiful view from the porch. Dew glittered like beads strung across the blades of grass and the forest was still mostly in shadow, a deep and serene green against the pale sky.

With no signs of the walkers from the previous night, she crouched low and hopped off the porch, boots sticking in the mud. She spared one glance back at her cabin before she turned and headed into the woods, thinking of piano keys and a one-eyed dog.

"Son of a bitch." Her voice landed flat against the underbrush where she lay. Her wrist was still in its cast and sometimes she was apt to forget about it, which was why she reached for her knife with the wrong hand, lost her grip, and dropped it. The walker was gruesome and way too close for comfort. She was face-to-face with one festering, yellow eye and an empty socket, thanking God and the stars and whomever else happened to be listening for the fortune of this thing having found her deer, the deer she'd been stalking for at least an hour, before it found her.

It pissed her off, obviously, but she was grateful, because it meant not only that she was in one piece, (for now) but also that she had _followed an actual deer_ for miles. In keeping her eye on it, every stray thought of Dawn had dissolved from her mind. All she could think about was proving to herself and some invisible force that she could do it on her own. It wasn't until she rounded a willow tree and found the walker elbow-deep in the animal's stomach that it occurred to her that she wasn't the only one hunting. And she felt _ridiculous._ What on earth kind of person forgets about something like that?

_The kind who forgets long enough to open the door because there may or may not be a dog on the front porch._

A fire exploded in her chest as she lunged for the walker, and it burst into the rest of her body as soon as she realized that her knife had fallen to the ground. She had no time to search for it as the walker lunged for her with its bloodied hands. For a fraction of a second she had the same thought that she assumed everyone had these days: "I'm going to be killed by a dead thing."

Beth lost her balance and the backpack's weight tipped her over backward. She landed at a painful angle with the jars digging into her spine and the walker scrambling at her legs and _think think think Beth!_

Using her leverage from the awkward angle she swung her leg upward, landing a hit square in the walker's face. It spat and hissed and growled but it was damaged pretty well. The jaw was skewed away from the rest of its face and the teeth were mostly gone. Beth's stomach turned with the sudden sorrow she felt for this person; it curdled with her fear and she thought she might vomit right where she lay.

"Sorry," she gasped. It lunged at her once more, empty hunger in its one eye, but Beth had drawn her gun from the waistband of her jeans and pulled the trigger. And it was done. The shot rang in her ears and blood was everywhere_, everywhere_, but she was alive.

Her back hurt like hell and she had to find her knife and get out of here before more walkers showed up, but she was alive.

Slipping her arms out of the backpack's straps she pushed herself to her knees, reaching out to the tree next to her for support. Once she was to her feet, she looked over her shoulder at the poor deer, and then to the walker she just killed. For the first time Beth realized that it was wearing a yellow sweater like one she had had at home. It was muddy and torn and unraveling at the hems, but really, what wasn't in this world?

Her ears were still ringing when she found her knife glinting in the sun five feet away. Sometimes she thought about using it to tear off her cast, shedding the last remnant of the time she spent at the hospital, but as it was she'd be better off with a mildly incapacitated hand instead of no hand at all. Other times she figured she'd wear the cast forever; a battle scar.

A warm mist had begun to fall, soft as feathers, and in the suffocating air it felt delicious on her sticky skin. It had been weeks since Atlanta, she was sure, weeks since the hospital and running water and the simple luxury of a proper bath. After she fled, she spent several days doing nothing but putting as much distance between the city and herself as possible. She'd hardly slowed down long enough to eat. Sleep had come in shallow, uneven waves, and she'd even spent one night high in a tree stand. There was no pattern to her movements, no rhyme to go with the beat of her soles in the dirt. Only _away. _Maybe she would find her family; maybe she wouldn't. She had to be alive to do it, though. So _away _she'd gone. _Away _she was still going.

Darting around like a newborn calf on legs too-long, she thought, and eyes too wide to focus, but always the steady _away._

As Beth walked the rain diminished. The underbrush clung to her boots and she was briefly grateful for how the sodden twigs muted her steps. She could be stealthy, but so could anything else that lived (or didn't) in the heart of the woods. A fat drop of water rolled down her cheek and landed on the corner of her mouth, salty and faintly coppery. Catching the drop on her finger and finding it red, Beth realized her stitches had opened and the rain had drawn a watercolor line with her blood. She felt the cobwebs stretching on the inside of her flesh again. She had told Daryl that she didn't cry anymore, and only once made a liar of herself- on the day that her daddy died. For heaven's sake, she _smiled_ at the sight of Noah's sneaker's limping around the corner, flat on her stomach and ready to bear enough punishment for the both of them. She suddenly remembered her daddy reading the story of the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane.

She _missed_ him. She felt so last time she was truly without her family before all of this began was some faraway night that she only remembered in hazy images, having "borrowed" Maggie's old Corolla to meet her friends in town. Such a silly, childish thing it now seemed. Her whole life kind of felt that way up until very recently.

Dawn's voice stuck in her mind like a briar on her sleeve. "Out there… you are nothing. Except dead or somebody's burden." Maybe this was her buoyancy more than the idea of finding and being found: continuing to prove to herself that she was more. To prove that she was strong. That the scar on her wrist was not a death sentence for a reason.

The spaces in between the trees had begun to widen and the sun reached through like a burning fist. Beth shielded her eyes as she slowed her pace, a feeling she couldn't explain telling her that she was coming upon something different… maybe even important. Perhaps she was becoming a better tracker, after all, without even realizing it.

Her palm around her knife was sweaty and she felt her fingernails digging into her skin. Faraway to her left a walker with long hair and a dirty white dress stumbled along. Beth held her muscles very still, watching, and only breathed when she realized that it was moving away from her. It was the first she had seen since the walker in the yellow sweater.

She shifted her shoulders under the backpack straps, the jars of beets clinking within. Soon she would rest, tend to her stitches, and choke down some brunch (_ha! when had she ever eaten brunch?), _but first she needed to find a place to do all of these things. She needed to rinse her hands in a creek or a wide puddle. She needed to find water, _period_-she was thirstier than a dog.

Then it occurred to her: why would the trees suddenly begin to part as they did? There had to be a creek nearby! Her heart soared.

...and then it dropped into the dirt when what she found at her feet was not a cool stream of water, but a railroad track stretching beyond the horizon in both directions, overgrown with weeds.

Her tracking skills were not improving, and she would be drinking beet juice with her delicious beets and beets sandwich.

_Still… _her hope fluttered. _This might be my best bet at finding someone else._

But which direction? There was no way that she had been travelling in a straight line since the cabin. It just wasn't possible. She had no map, no compass, and only a vague sense of direction _before_ the world fell to pieces.

I am not a burden to anyone, and that includes myself. I can make something of this.

Beth untucked the pistol from her jeans and made certain that it was loaded before she replaced it. She tightened her grip on the knife just to make sure, and she rocked forward to test the weight of the backpack, as if she hadn't been carrying it for miles and miles already. Somehow the motion reassured her. Then, pushing back at the sun and the cicadas, she stepped onto the track and headed right.

**_**

**Beth remembered all at once why walking on train tracks sucked ****_so bad- _****you had to keep your pace exactly right to match the spaces in the boards. If your strides were too narrow or too wide, you would trip, and with such a relentlessly steady rhythm it became very boring very quickly. It was safer than walking in the high grass, though. **

Her back was aching.

Up ahead she spotted what appeared to be a poster on a utility pole. From this distance she couldn't tell what it said, if anything at all, so tried to quicken her steps as best she could.

As she got closer, she realized it was a collage of newsprint laminated with what seemed to be packing tape. There was a little metal awning jutting out above the makeshift poster, presumably to protect it from the rain. In large black letters was written:

_**SANCTUARY**_

_**FOR ALL**_

_**COMMUNITY**_

_**FOR ALL**_

_**THOSE WHO ARRIVE **_

_**SURVIVE**_

Beneath was a map of Georgia with a star drawn in the center. **TERMINUS**, it said.

_What the hell does this mean?_


End file.
